Valiant Hearts: The Great War (2014)

As the name implies, Valiant Hearts: The Great War focuses on four characters during World War I. On the surface, it looks like an all-ages game, and certainly it is to an extent. Part adventure game, it's got a beautiful, cartoon-like art style and features characters mumbling in their respective languages. Part educational game, it also makes sure to provide you with historical facts spread out the story. About to be taken into the Battle of Verdun? Here's a little blurb you can read that's just a few sentences explaining it. It's informative and engaging in a way that makes it both safe for younger players and profound for older or more mature ones.

Despite its art style and lean-back gameplay, it manages to tell one of the most compelling, hopeful, and depressing stories of any war game. There is none of the false bravado found in Battlefield or Call of Duty, nor do you truly see much in the way of specific violence. One of the most interesting things you pick up on in this game is how none of your characters ever seem to hold a gun. In those rare instances you do, it's either stuck to your back or you hit people with the butt of it. You don't kill anyone for the majority of the game. 

It's hard to explain fully how a cartoon-looking, non-lethal puzzle game with a penchant for having the characters get out of rough situations perfectly depict war as gruesome and bleak. Yet Valiant Hearts does. Breaking away from typical war game tropes, you don't start as a soldier. You aren't dropped into the middle of the war as someone who has enlisted. Instead, you are brought into the every day life of a farming family. More poignantly, you start off as someone who has been drafted. It highlights the toll war can have on families, but it's a fundamentally different starting point than most war games to start as someone who doesn't want to go to war.

For the longest time, the game avoids the dark and disgusting nature of the war.  Each character manages to get out of whatever sticky situation they find themselves in. At face value, it appears relatively safe. However, we eventually do see a bunch of characters get mercilessly gunned down as they try to cross the trench, or get blown up by falling mortar shells, of friends die. Death is a very real threat in the game, even if at times it feels like something that just happens to other people.

That is, until the very end. As the story progresses, we learn more and more about the inefficient ways the war was conducted. Military and political leaders looked at soldiers as mere numbers, and often tried to defeat the enemy by throwing more at them. They threw these citizens into the most terrifying and vicious conditions with little aid and expected victory. By the end, it seems likely that soldiers would start to mutiny. And indeed they do.  The final mission places one character in the deadliest battle of the entire war, in which a foolish charge keeps going and going. Plus, you're constantly dodging machine gun fire and mortars.

This level is brilliant, and designed to be metaphor itself. After a few minutes, you start to realize that you've been been charging for a pretty long time. Almost too long. As you see people around you get slaughtered, you start to wonder when this charge will end. It feels like it never will, and that whatever is at the end can't be worth it. Then you realize, that's exactly what the soldiers must think too. What was the point of charging through No Man's Land? To what end where they doing so? Every time they took a few meters of land, the enemy would simply take it back. The only thing keeping you as a player charging forward is the French commander behind you, ready to shoot you should you refuse to obey orders.

After hours and hours of the game appearing to play it safe - careful to show the despair without itself becoming overwhelmingly depressing - they flip the script. First, they show a character saving a family at the last possible second, with an achievement unlocking called "Some Will Survive."  Another character even finally receives another letter from her father. Things seem oddly hopeful, until one character is sentenced to death for disobeying orders and accidentally kill his commanding officer.

As he is marched to the firing squad, he passes his fellow soldiers. All of them salute him, recognizing that he did what all of them wanted to do. In his letter to his daughter, he says, "War makes men mad."  He is describing the men who started the war and tore their families and nations apart. He's describing the men who forced soldiers to perform suicidal charges for little to no gain. And he's describing the situation he is in. War makes men mad. They create these horrible and unreasonable situations, and it's other men that pay the price. 

It's such a profound statement - albeit nothing unusual. It is nonetheless powerful and sad. It's strange that the game spent so much time avoiding tragedy that it ends on such a tragic note, but when it comes to World War I, there was never going to be any other result, really. In many ways, Valiant Hearts plays out like one of those classic poems from the War.

It's an incredible game with interesting and fun puzzles. It also features one of the better uses of a dog ally in any game. The art is beautiful and the music is so sad and heartfelt. So few things recall the events of the first World War. No one seems to give it much thought. It's only fitting that this game reminds us that we are dangerously close to completely forgetting one of the most tragic events in human history, never mind of the last century. 

Fun, educational, poignant, emotional, and beautiful, it's truly a great little game.